are does rather change one’s priorities.’
‘If you’re Cahuella, then my men killed your wife.’ His voice was thin and reedy, like a child’s. ‘I’d have thought you were even more keen to have me killed.’
‘Tanner killed Cahuella’s wife,’ I said. ‘The fact that he thought he was going to save her doesn’t really alter things.’
‘Are you Cahuella or not, in that case?’
‘I might have been, once. Now Cahuella doesn’t exist.’ I looked hard into the screen. ‘And frankly, I don’t think anyone’s going to mourn him, are they?’
Reivich pursed his lips distastefully. ‘Cahuella’s weapons butchered my family,’ he said. ‘He sold arms which murdered my loved ones. For that I could gladly have tortured him.’
‘If you’d killed Gitta, that would have been more torture than you could ever have inflicted on him with knives and electrodes.’
‘Would it? Did he really love her that much?’
I examined my memories, in the hope of answering him. In the end all I could offer was, ‘I don’t know. He was a man capable of a lot of things. All I do know is that Tanner loved her at least as much as Cahuella.’
‘But Gitta did die. What did that do to Cahuella?’
‘It made him very hateful,’ I said, thinking back to the white room, which still lingered slightly beyond recall, like a nightmare not quite brought to mind after waking. ‘But he took that hatred out on Tanner.’
‘Tanner lived though, didn’t he?’
‘Some part of him,’ I said. ‘Not necessarily any part we’d call human.’
Reivich was silent for a minute, the difficulty of our meeting obviously weighing hard on him. Finally he said, ‘Gitta. She was the only innocent in any of this, wasn’t she? The only one who didn’t deserve any of it.’
There was no arguing with that.
The hollow interior of Refuge was locked in perpetual gloom, like a city in blackout. Unlike the gloom of Chasm City, this was deliberate; a state of affairs willed into being by the groups which claimed tenancy here. There was nothing resembling a native ecology. The interior was unpressurised apart from trace gases, and every square inch of the walls was occupied by sealed, windowless structures, linked by an intestinal tangle of transit tubes. The dimly glowing tubes were the only source of illumination, which wasn’t saying much — and if it had not been for the enhanced biology of my eyes, I doubted that I’d have been able to see anything at all.
Yet the place hummed with a sense of barely managed power; a constant subliminal rumble which transmitted itself into the bones. The balcony we stood on was sheeted over with airtight glass, but even so I had the feeling that I was standing in the corner of a vast, shadowy turbine room in which every generator was spinning at full tilt.
Reivich had given the authorisation for Refuge security to let me in, provided my party were escorted to him. I had misgivings about this — it was too much out of my control — but we had absolutely no choice but to comply with Reivich’s wishes. This was where the chase ended — on his territory. And by sleight of hand, it was no longer Reivich who was being chased.
It might have been Tanner.
Maybe it was me.
Refuge was sufficiently small that there was no real drawback in walking from point to point within its interior; a fact aided by the relatively weak artificial gravity which the habitat’s lazy spin imparted. We were led into one of the connecting tunnels: a three-metre-wide tube fashioned from thick smoky glass, with intermittent glass irises spaced along its length, dilating open and shut to allow us passage and to make abundantly clear the fact that we were being shepherded, like food passing along the gullet. The walk took us further along the main axis of the spindle, gravity rising as we descended from the endcap, but never reaching anything like one gee. The unlit structures of Refuge towered over us like canyon walls at night, and there was no sense whatsoever that anyone else inhabited the place. The truth was that the kind of clientele which Refuge serviced were the kind of people who demanded absolute discretion, even from others like themselves.
‘Has Reivich been mapped yet?’ I asked, realising that it was an obvious question which so far hadn’t occurred to me. ‘After all, that’s why he’s here.’
‘Not yet,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘There are all sorts of physiological tests which need to be made first, to ensure that the mapping is optimised — cell membrane chemistry, neurotransmitter properties, glial cell structure, blood- brain volume, that kind of thing. You only get one shot at it, you see.’
‘Reivich’s going for the full destructive scan?’
‘Something very close to it. It’s still the way to get the best resolution, they say.’
‘Once he’s scanned, he won’t have to worry about an irritation like Tanner.’
‘Not unless Tanner follows him.’
I laughed — before I realised that Quirrenbach wasn’t making a joke.
‘Where do you think Tanner’s now?’ Zebra said, walking to my left, her heels clicking on the floor, her elongated reflection like dancing scissors in the wall’s reflection.
‘Somewhere Reivich has his eye on him,’ I said. ‘Along with Amelia, I hope.’
‘Is she really to be trusted?’
‘She might be the only person who hasn’t betrayed one of us,’ I said. ‘At least not intentionally. But I’m sure of one thing. Tanner’s stringing her along only until she ceases to be of use to him. Once that moment comes — and it might be soon — she’ll be in very great danger.’
Chanterelle said, ‘You came here to save her?’
For a moment I wanted to answer in the affirmative; to dredge up some tiny crumb of self-respect and pretend that I was a human being capable of something other than wickedness. And maybe it wouldn’t have been entirely untrue — maybe Amelia was a large part of the reason I’d come here, knowing it was everything that Tanner wanted. But she wasn’t the largest part, and the last thing I felt like doing was lying any more, least of all to myself.
‘I came here to end what Cahuella started,’ I said. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
The smoked-glass tunnel wound its way up again, towards the far endcap of Refuge, and then punched its way into the lightless side of one of the looming airtight structures. At the end of this particular stretch of tunnel was another iris, currently sealed. But this one was gloss-black, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond it.
I walked up to it and pressed my cheek against the unyielding metal, straining to hear something.
‘Reivich?’ I called. ‘We’re here! Open up!’
The door irised open, more ponderously than those we’d passed through earlier on.
Cool green light streamed through the opening arcs, bathing us in its insipidity. Suddenly the fact that I didn’t have a weapon — that none of us were armed — hit home. I might die in a second, I thought — and probably not even know it when it happened. I had allowed myself to be admitted into the lair of a man who had everything to fear from me, and no reason in the universe to trust me. Did that make Reivich or myself the bigger fool? I couldn’t begin to guess. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Refuge as quickly as possible.
The door opened fully, revealing a bronze-walled antechamber, with vivid green lamps hanging from the ceiling. Bas-relief gold symbols scurried around the walls, iterating similar mathematical statements to those I had seen when I’d spoken to Reivich; the incantations which could shatter a mind into ones and zeros; pure number.
There was no doubt that he was here.
The door closed behind us and another irised ahead, revealing a much larger space, like the inside of a cathedral. The room was bathed in golden light, yet its extremities were so far away that they were lost in shadow. I could see the slight curvature of Refuge’s floor, an effect accentuated by the interlocking bronze and silver chevrons which patterned the floor.
The air smelled of incense.
A man sat in the distance, in the middle of a pool of brighter light shafting from a stained-glass window far above. He sat facing away from us, in a high-backed chair of ornate construction, wreathed in gold. A trio of slender bipedal servitors stood a few metres from the chair, presumably awaiting instructions. I studied the shape of his
